HELLIER’S chambers in Clifford’s Inn were a part of the past. So was the staircase that led to them.

Generations of lawyers and rats and the fogs of two hundred or so Novembers had left their traces on wall and ceiling, on floors that sagged, and stairs that groaned, and doors that jammed, and chimneys that smoked.

On windy nights one heard all sorts of quaint arguments in the chimney and behind the wainscoting. Steps of defunct lawyers sounded in the passage outside and sitting by the flickering fire-light before the lamp was lit you might, were you an imaginative man, have heard or seen pretty much anything your fancy willed.

The rooms had a smell of their own, quite peculiar to themselves and not unpleasant to an antiquarian mind.

A smell of must, or was it rats, or was it dead and gone lawyers? a faint, faint perfume, which, if one could bottle, one might label “Clifford’s Inn,” just as M. Warrick labels his productions, “Ess Bouquet,” or “New-mown Hay.”

Hellier’s sitting-room was a comfortable enough place despite the doors that would not open except when kicked, or at their own caprice, the skeleton-suggesting cupboards, the creaking floor and the sounds and scents of age.

There were plenty of books for one thing, a few good engravings, a comfortable easy chair, a hospitable-looking tobacco jar, a cigar cabinet not too big and not too small, a bright brass kettle on the hob, a canister of green tea in one of the musty-fusty smelling cupboards and a tantalus case on the table where Archbald’s Lunacy reposed from its labours of teaching under a volume of Baudelaire.

Evidently it was the room of a barrister with tastes of his own.

Hellier, since leaving Boulogne some weeks ago, with the dossier of the Lefarge case in his pocket, had spent some days in Paris.

He had gone into the case with that thoroughness which a man only exhibits when urged by either of the two great motive powers of life, ambition or love.

He had obtained an introduction to M. Hamard, he had interviewed the detectives who had been engaged on the case, he had pored over files of newspapers, and from M. Hamard, from the detectives, from the printed reports, he had obtained only the one dreary and reiterated statement: “M. Lefarge is guilty. The case admits of no other verdict. The thing is conclusively proved and the affair is closed.”

He had returned to London and there again carefully sifted the evidence alone in his rooms in Clifford’s Inn. Reviewing the whole matter, he could not but come to the conclusion arrived at by M. Hamard, the detectives and the newspapers. He could not but say to himself: “However much I wish to believe the contrary, I must believe what is the fact. M. Lefarge was guilty of as cruel and calculated and cold-blooded a murder as was ever committed by man.”

This was bad, for his love for Cécile Lefarge had grown into a passion. One talks and laughs about heartache, but heartache is a pain beside which all other pains are trifles. To be possessed by the image of a woman, to love her and to know that she returns one’s love, to be separated from her, to live without her and without assured hope of possessing her is the cruellest torture ever inflicted by an all-wise Providence on man.

Love is not blind, it confers the brightest and clearest vision to the person it possesses. Hellier knew quite well, knew for a certainty, that, till this cloud was cleared from her father’s name, Cécile Lefarge would never marry.

She was the daughter of an assassin. He was quite prepared to forget the fact. She could never do so. It was a penalty laid upon her by fate and she would not palter with the fact, and unless her father’s name was, by some miracle, cleared, she would go to her grave as she was, upheld by that iron determination which women alone possess when the passions are concerned and which is at once the most beautiful and the most terrible trait in women.

And the thing was hopeless, for M. L............